Diverse Joy

This episode, we invite special guest Xizhou Xie (pronounced “She-Joe She-uh”), an artist, statistician, and Chinese-American immigrant. Xizhou’s joy this episode is her wonderful cats, Shadow and Kit-Kat! Amber’s joy is a local BIPOC community group, and Will’s joy is his and producer Eric Roman’s annual “Soup-er Bowl” party. 
For the main discussion topic on belonging, Xizhou shares some of her story of how she came to the U.S., how she thinks of belonging (or lack thereof) as an immigrant in the U.S., and that in recent times it’s been especially difficult for immigrants in the United States. The hosts discuss related concepts like racial battle fatigue and how to address ambiguous bias.
During Story Time, Xizhou shares a negative story about anti-Asian racism, especially highlighting how overt hate can happen anywhere, even in places we hope are more safe or accepting. Her positive story relates to having a booth at an LGBTQ+ Pride event, where she felt amazing community, safety, and belonging, even without identifying as a member of LGBTQ+ community. The positive story leads to great discussion about cross-group solidarity across stigmatized identities.
Xizhou’s statistical expertise was wonderful to have as we discussed the answer to our question, “What are some challenges when working with data comparing identity groups?” Even if you are not a scientist or mathematician, this is an excellent primer on how to understand statistics that compare racial, LGBTQ+, or other groups, which can more easily be overblown or misrepresented.
The Bias Habit-Breaking Skill is Cognitive Inertia, which perpetuates our preexisting ideas in a number of ways. These include Attentional Spotlight, in which our attention is biased such that we notice more confirmatory evidence, Confirmation Bias, in which we give more weight to confirmatory than disconfirmatory evidence, and Untested Assumptions, when there is no evidence at all, but our own assumptions are a mental rehearsal that can strengthen stereotypes. Xizhou was an author with Will on one of the big research papers providing evidence for some of these phenomena! Xizhou and Amber share additional examples of Untested Assumptions, specifically related to assumptions that Asian folks don’t speak English well. 
Xizhou’s joyful recommendation is the whimsical Icelandic-Chinese musician Laufey (Loy-vey), who is “making jazz music cool again.” Her music gives you “main character energy” and fills you with joy!  

Check out Xizhou's art! 

https://xizhouxie.com/

https://www.facebook.com/xizhouxieart

 

Dr. Cox’s book becomes available for preorder! The publisher is University of California Press, and the full title is Overcoming Bias Habits: An Evidence-Based Guide to Creating a Joyfully Inclusive World.

Check your small local bookstores!

From Amazon: https://a.co/d/iwnakbM

From Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/overcoming-bias-habits-william-t-l-cox-phd/1148276458?ean=9780520410428

We now have merch! Buy some to support the show at https://www.biashabit.com/store

Follow Diverse Joy on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads, and Bluesky.

It’s our New Year’s episode (happy 2026 everybody)! For this mid-winter episode, Will shares the joy of going to the Lake Geneva Winterfest America’s Snow Sculpting Invitational™ and the delightful sights of artfully crafted snow sculptures there, and Amber’s joy is discovering new-to-her music and musicians like Doechii, Panic Shack, and Olivia Dean!
The discussion topic is Learning About Bias in Kids, including how kids learn bias from their environments and peers, and how they often display bias, even when their parents don’t think they will, due to not having learned to filter their thoughts yet. Kids learn especially strongly from modeling the behavior of their peers. They also pick up on subtle cues from their parents’ and other adults’ behaviors, even subtle, unintentional biases. Amber gives some great advice about how to react when kids point out differences they see in other people (spoiler: avoiding it because it is uncomfortable is not the answer!). 
In story time, we share a listener story about a kid who thought romantic couples had to be same-race (since those types of couples are much more prominent than mixed-race couples), and a story about a time a kid was thoughtful about gender identity and pronouns–and even corrected an authority figure.
This episode’s question was “Can dogs be racist?” (Which is more accurately, “Can dogs be racially biased?” since “racist” and “racism” are about systems of oppression, which dogs are not active participants of.) We discuss some of the ways dogs can learn racial biases from their owners–which actually ties back to the ways that kids learn the same things from their parents.
This episode’s bias habit-breaking skill involves understanding and undermining Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, which happens when our expectations about someone else lead us to behave in ways that bring out the behavior we expected. Will discusses this concept using examples from a group of probation officers he worked with, who had a policy that might create self-fulfilling prophecies with recidivism rates. 
The joyful recommendation this time comes from Will, who recommends the diverse, intriguing, hilarious, genre-bending television show, The Afterparty (2022-2023), starring the amazing Tiffany Haddish (an Apple TV+ exclusive that ran for two seasons).

Dr. Cox’s book becomes available for preorder! The publisher is University of California Press, and the full title is Overcoming Bias Habits: An Evidence-Based Guide to Creating a Joyfully Inclusive World.

Check your small local bookstores!

From Amazon: https://a.co/d/iwnakbM

From Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/overcoming-bias-habits-william-t-l-cox-phd/1148276458?ean=9780520410428

We now have merch! Buy some to support the show at https://www.biashabit.com/store

Follow Diverse Joy on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads, and Bluesky.

Will and Amber’s joys this holiday season relate to holiday traditions: Amber’s recalls how her mom would give her and her brother gift every day of the month leading up to Christmas as kids, and then segueing that into gifting board games as adults, and getting to spend time together playing them; and Will talks the current tradition of he and Eric Roman getting Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars from past guest (and friend) Sandy Eichel and their wife!
For this episode’s main discussion, the hosts draw on Amber’s clinical expertise in discussing wellness and the mind–body connection. This can be especially relevant around the holidays because of the stress and pressures to create joyful holiday memories, or just how the holidays can lead to spending time with extended family that might be trying. They discuss how the amygdala and prefrontal cortex influence our moods and behavior, as well as methods to bring ourselves back to a state of calm after emotions strongly impact us: One such regulatory skill uses the acronym SHINE, including your Senses, Humming, Inner Joy, Notice Color, and Exhale. This episode is also the official introduction of the Wellness Skill segment, something we’ve occasionally had but never labeled.
In story time, both the positive and negative stories expand on the mind–body connection, with Amber sharing how she recognized the ways in which an unpleasant colleague was causing negative reactions in her body, and Will sharing about recognizing when aroused states (including learning another acronym, HALTS - Hungry, Angry, Late/Lonely, Tired, or Surprised) can lead to more bias. 
This month’s audience question asks how mind–body connection may bring in special concerns for members of stigmatized groups, with Will and Amber addressing that topic, and tying the response back to previous discussions of racial battle fatigue.
This episode’s bias habit-breaking skill involves Norm Enforcement, where people act in ways to enforce norms, including norms that arise from stereotypes, because our brains “like” when people conform to norms and “dislike” when people violate them.
Amber’s joyful recommendation this episode is Jingle Jangle, a lovely musical Afro-Futuristic Christmas movie with a Black-centered cast. She also shouted out additional Black-centered Christmas movies including This Christmas, Last Holiday, and The Preacher’s Wife.
Happy holidays, everyone! Now, go find your joy.

Dr. Cox’s book becomes available for preorder! The publisher is University of California Press, and the full title is Overcoming Bias Habits: An Evidence-Based Guide to Creating a Joyfully Inclusive World.

Check your small local bookstores!

From Amazon: https://a.co/d/iwnakbM

From Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/overcoming-bias-habits-william-t-l-cox-phd/1148276458?ean=9780520410428

We now have merch! Buy some to support the show at https://www.biashabit.com/store

Follow Diverse Joy on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads, and Bluesky.

In excitement for the release of the movie Wicked: For Good later this month, Amber and Will are dressed as Elfie and Guy-linda from Wicked!
Will’s joy this month is Heels and Wheels, a disability-inclusive dance group in Madison, Wisconsin. Amber’s joy is the power of Wicked The Musical and especially the movie starring Cynthia Erivo, which brings a new depth of feeling to the character of Elphaba as portrayed by a Black woman, and especially her experience of the Pet-to-Threat phenomenon. Amber also adored going to a sing-along screening of Wicked: Part 1 with her family!
This episode’s discussion topic involves the science behind the brain’s reward system and how it is involved in stereotyping and bias. Stereotypes lead to probabilistically uncertain predictions, and when those predictions are upheld, it engages your brain’s reward system. This is sometimes called “intermittent reinforcement”, which is the most difficult learning pattern to overcome. We can all work on trying to recognize that we might have positive emotional reactions when stereotypes are upheld, and frustrated emotional reactions when stereotypes or predictions are disrupted–those are fundamental building blocks for understanding and undermining bias habits. Finding pleasure (e.g., joy!) in things that oppose stereotypes and bias can help work against these neural processes and improve diversity and inclusion.
During story time, Will shares a story about someone who used a rude statement to try to prove stereotypes are true. Amber’s more positive story was about her summer camp’s commitment to diversity and their statement regarding gender inclusion that embraces transgender and nonbinary identities.
Continuing from the Wicked discussion, this episode’s question revisits the Pet-to-Threat phenomenon we talked about in Season 2, Episode 13, and discuss what other factors sometimes drive diverse people out of career paths, especially academic careers. 
For the bias habit-breaking skill, this time we’re talking Impression Justification, which involves having a “good gut feeling” when someone matches stereotypes or “bad gut feeling” when someone mismatches stereotypes. Those gut feelings then become lenses that color your judgments. 
Amber’s joyful recommendation is everything related to Oz, including The Wizard of Oz, Wicked, Return to Oz, The Wiz, and all of Frank L. Baum’s books!

Dr. Cox’s book becomes available for preorder! The publisher is University of California Press, and the full title is Overcoming Bias Habits: An Evidence-Based Guide to Creating a Joyfully Inclusive World.

Check your small local bookstores!

From Amazon: https://a.co/d/iwnakbM

From Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/overcoming-bias-habits-william-t-l-cox-phd/1148276458?ean=9780520410428

We now have merch! Buy some to support the show at https://www.biashabit.com/store

Follow Diverse Joy on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads, and Bluesky.

For this Halloween episode, Will is dressed as Dracula and Amber is the Bride of Frankenstein! This is the first episode of season 3, and Amber’s joy is all the great reactions the podcast has received, including “Diverse Joy” being officially ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts globally! Will’s joy is that his book, "Overcoming Bias Habits", is now available for preorder! (Details below.)
This episode’s discussion topic is how joy can be used as a scientifically validated tool against bias. Some of this concept is reflected in historical and contemporary notions of “joy as resistance,” using joy in many forms—community, song, fellowship—to fight injustice and oppression. They also discuss the distinction between genuine joy and performative or toxic positivity. Many scientists say that the primary driving force behind bias is having more pleasant (i.e., joyful) memories with similar folks and fewer with those who are different from you. In that way, cultivating diverse joy, in terms of building more, and more joyful, memories with diverse people, directly helps combat and push back against bias in your mind and behavior. The discussion brings into focus two primary goals that Will and Amber want everyone to keep in mind: doing the work to 1) cultivate diverse joy, and 2) disrupt bias habits. Working on each goal can help you with the other, and together they will help us all build a better world, bit by bit. 
Our answers to this episode’s question explains that we don’t talk about current events because every episode is meant to be an evergreen educational resource, and discussing current events would date the episodes in an unhelpful way.
During story time, the more negative story this episode involves how one of Amber’s colleagues had traumatic negative experiences with Black folks, which fueled them to have stronger unintentional race bias towards her. This episode’s positive story comes from a listener who shared that they actively use the notion of bias being a habit whenever they notice a biased thought.
Our bias habit-breaking skill continues that theme, encouraging us all to Approach Biases as Habits to be Broken. We further emphasize that all the habit-breaking skills are actionable (they involve you doing something), self-sustainable (you can maintain them over time), customizable (you can adapt them to different contexts), and generalizable (you use them to work on biases related to race, gender, LGBTQ+ statuses, age, disability, or any other group status you can think of). 
Will’s joyful recommendation is the movie “Sinners.” It includes themes of “joy as resistance” with the Black community combating racism through a horror allegory. It is a fun, not-too-scary vampire romp to help you cultivate diverse joy and disrupt bias habits!

Dr. Cox’s book becomes available for preorder the day this episode releases! Preorder through our website BiasHabit.com, on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The publisher is University of California Press, and the full title is Overcoming Bias Habits: An Evidence-Based Guide to Creating a Joyfully Inclusive World.

Preorder Overcoming Bias Habits

From Amazon: https://a.co/d/iwnakbM

From Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/overcoming-bias-habits-william-t-l-cox-phd/1148276458?ean=9780520410428

We now have merch! Buy some to support the show at https://www.biashabit.com/store

Follow Diverse Joy on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads, and Bluesky.